Charity Wristbands

The expression ‘Wear your heart on your sleeve’ could have been invented for the spineless, gurning, grinning, nice-boy, shallow misfits who wear these badges of honour up their skinny arms like Knights of Old, thundering into battle against world poverty, AIDS, battered wives and whales who never asked to be saved by fucking hippies.

If you don’t know what I’m on about, check the wrist of the next chinless student or OSCAR accepting vapid Hollywood clothes horse.

If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, you really should get out more, or move down from the nipple zone in the pictures of Maria Aguilera in your latest copy of Hello! Magazine.

Plastic charity wristbands.

I usually hover around the 8.2 mark on the ‘Lets nut the student for fun’ gauge. But the sight of half a dozen of these plastic fantastic moral high ground winning emblems nudges me instantly up to 9.7. It only requires them to utter the fatal words ‘Excuse me. Can I get to the bar?’ and its ‘Alakazammee – stairheed rammy’ time and I must once more promise to buy the bouncers a beer on my return.

Just the other night I am buying the beers, tranquillity exuding from every pore of my being on account of its a sunny evening and we have a big table in the beer garden, when a multi coloured plastic arm, armoured with the united colours of sanctimonious twat slides across the bar next to me, snagging the buttons on my Rolex Oyster Perpetual Daytona. A hanging offence itself in more well ordered times.

“Unhand me loon. Do not touch what you can’t afford. And what the fuck is all that about?” I enquire of the lisping poltroon.

“Ah, well the blue one is anti bullying, the red one is AIDS, the green one is endangered Marmosets, the yellow one is...”

“Shut the fuck up you shabby git with receding hair. That was not a question. It was a statement. You are well within my personal space so the next words you utter could well be ‘Nurse. What happened?’ I meant, what the fuck is it all about you thinking you can pay £2 for a poxy armband and that is your debt to the ills of society paid. That your multi colours arm means you can simper around the place, literally with your heart on your sleeve, demonstrating to the world what a caring, sharing cat you are, right deep down inside. Going to the G8 demo in Edinbrough are you? No? There’s a shock. Plan to work with AIDS victims in Zaire at any point? Help out with Shelter, Amnesty International, Oxfam or a breast cancer appeal? No? Heard of the 'Stop Caterkiller' campaign? No? Well fuck off out of my sight or I shall drag you to the gents and demonstrate wearing your heart on your sleeve as installation fucking art”.

I lost interest when people started wearing brass ones to ward off, er, um, whatever brass ones ward off.

Take care Chang, one of my merkin cowboy heroes, 'Marion Morrison', wore a copper bangle as he 'won the west' & 'fought the subversive apache'. Isn't it funny that merkin blokes are often given girls names.

...and the black tape that the idiot singer in coldplay wears on his hand...

raise his left hand innumerable times. On the back of that hand, he's drawn two black horizontal lines and accentuated them with rings of blue and red tape on his index and middle fingers. It's the iconography synonymous with Make Trade Fair, the international organization aimed at ending Third World debt through equal trade, which Martin has made his cause celeb.

although i have been known to wear a cock ring to protest against flaccidity.